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With the Linux 3.8 merge over, the Intel Linux graphics developers are looking toward 3.9. From a weblog entry by one of them: "Let's first look at bit at the drm core changes: The headline item this time around is the reworked kernel modeset locking. Finally the kernel doesn't stall for a few frames while probing outputs in the background! ... For general robustness of our GEM implementation we've clarified the various gpu reset state transitions. This should prevent applications from crashing while a gpu reset is going on due to the kernel leaking that transitory state to userspace. Ville Syrjälä also started to fix up our handling of pageflips across gpu hangs so that compositors no longer get stuck after a reset. Unfortunately not all of his patches made it into 3.9. Somewhat related is Mika Kuoppala's work to fix bugs across the seqnqo wrap-around. And to make sure that those bugs won't pop up again he also added some testing infrastructure. "
The thing I am most looking forward to is the gen4 relocation regression finally being fixed. No more GPU hangs when under heavy I/O load (the bane of my existence for a while now). The bug report is a good read if you think hunting for a tricky bug is fun.

And I only see AMD/ATI by choice because I know with an nVidia graphics chip there is no hope of an open source driver coming from then. Guess we both are voting with our wallets. Your vote is for "please me now", my vote is for "please me forever".

I hate to say it but Nvidia is making it happen now. They've managed to make installing graphics drivers totally painless. Hell it's easier than Windows! I'd love an open source driver that works but unfortunately I can choose AMD and have shitty graphics speed or I can fly with Nvidia. My religion just isn't strong enough.

I just go to software sources and select in the additional drivers tab whether I want the old, current or experimental drivers and video updates are transparant from that point. Since switching my gaming machine to experimental drivers (beta nvidia i think) I didn't have any problems, drivers are always latest beta. The machines at work just run the default nvidia ubuntu driver but they are all nvidia ion based, the most work they do in 3d is google earth, desktop accell is not that hard.:)

Intel briefly sold a discrete gpu back in the early days of agp but it was a failure in the market and since then they seem to have decided to sell their GPU techology as an integrated component of their platform (previously in the northbridge, now in the CPU).

Currently, when I look in store I really only see one vendor.

Your stores must suck, both NVIDIA and ATI are readilly available round here.

That HD3450 was released FIVE years ago. Not two. You have some very unrealistic expectations of support, especially since the reason the old drivers don't work is because the Linux kernel ABI is changed to stop them working, deliberately. Use the open source Radeon drivers instead, they're pretty stable and decent these days.

And NVidia still support cards that are much older than that in their closed source Linux drivers, plus open source support for their cards seems to be coming along much better than support for AMD cards right now. Also, some of the GPUs that AMD dropped support for were still being sold in new machines - particularly laptops - when they abandoned them.

Intel briefly sold a discrete gpu back in the early days of agp but it was a failure in the market and since then they seem to have decided to sell their GPU techology as an integrated component of their platform (previously in the northbridge, now in the CPU).

That was the i740 [wikipedia.org], and I think there's one buried in the back of my closet somewhere (a Real3D Starfighter card). The 3D image quality was quite good, and drivers were reasonably stable (at least by the time I bought mine). However, in terms of FPS, it was outclassed before it even hit the market.

they seem to have decided to sell their GPU techology as an integrated component

Rumor has it that they did a patent cross-licensing deal with nVidia and part of the deal was that they'd stay out of the component market. Much to the chagrin of everybody who would prefer a low-wattage graphics card.

It wouldn't matter to the end user. But if "Intel went into discrete graphics" it would likely signal a change in R&D priorities, and assuming that they would stay behind in that market seems foolish given the enormous amount of brain power they employ and the obvious bias in their current spending.

Intel sells server chips into the HPC market. These guys can run LINPACK on a TI99, and would if it gave good metrics per watt and dollar. Intel has a corporate culture to protect their server CPU margins by not "cannibalizing" it with alternatives that cost less and do more. Same on desktop.

Their problem is that if they won't eat the slow-moving members of their tribe, there's another tribe who will.

Intel has a cabinet where a whole bunch of innovation is stored up against a firm competitor. Now migh

Not unless they dramatically increase performance. Many servers of course don't need much if any graphics, but a workstation or gaming box (think Steam for Linux) want more power than their current technologies can deliver.

Intel has it. They're just not selling it to you. They have to figure out how to prevent us from running webserver VMs on this hardware before they release it. Unfortunately for them it's a lost cause. The people making these decisions really don't understand the mechanics of the situation, or how clever software can extract the utility of a GPU and deliver it to a cpu. Intel is now run by business geeks who really don't understand the tech. From here the end is clear.

we call them morons, why would one cripple their computer, a suposed tool to get things done to hold them selves higher in the morality of a fucking driver is beyond me, I have shit to get done, not be political with my tools.

Or they are willing to suffer a bit now in an attempt to create a new market segment for open drivers. You could call them investors instead of morons. Also there are issues with reporting bugs when your kernel is tainted. This can be critical for some people. Maybe you can try to educate yourself about their motivation before calling them "morons".

If I'm talking about a server, or a netbook, I could give a crap. Intel graphics are fine, and in fact I far prefer them for the same reasons (you? others?) do. But if we're talking about a desktop, or any kind of powerful portable, intel just doesn't cut it. It falls down in too many ways. I am more than willing, however, to give them my money if they can get some real performance going. I am not concerned about it being the best, either. I simply want it to provide a good price:performance ratio, and I do

Yeah, I'm way behind the times. You have like 3 Valve games, Crusader Kings 2, and then a bunch of indie games that range from mediocre to terrible. Almost all of which have been available for years on both Windows and OS X.

Not only are there applications for 3d graphics other than games, but I can also run Windows games, either under Wine or VMware, which has a D3D to OpenGL layer which actually works, unlike the one in Virtualbox...

Easily surmountable problems. Intel slap some uber fast cache memory right next to the CPU for direct access to the CPU/GPU cores. I'm not saying they will necessarily compete at the uber high end, but the uber high end is depserately looking for an actual market to sell to these days - the software is trailing.

Getting into discrete graphics they way you're thinking is a waste of money. Graphics cards are going the way of the dodo bird. The current trend is moving everything is moving onto the CPU. Onboard graphics has already cannibalized the low end graphics market, and is starting to cannibalize the mid-range. It's only a matter of time before the onboard tech catches up to the discrete tech.

I think they'd take over the linux graphics-card market. Maybe not much of a market now, but potentially could be big enough to justify doing it.

Why? To gain what, an extra % of marketshare?

Intel's already the largest GPU vendor out there by quantity. With very little exception, if you have an Intel CPU, you probably have Intel graphics coming along for the ride - companies like ATi^H^H^HAMD and nVidia are going after the leftovers.

Intel's gotten there by being good enough to most people - their GPUs are ad

Since Vista, the Windows OS deals with this by chatting with the graphics,if the graphics doesn't reply in a reasonable amount of time the OS will reset the program.

Playing an intensive game like Battle Field 3 this tends to happen a lot. The videocard is too busy and doesn't have the time to chat; so the game just goes away.Your either at your desktop like nothing is wrong other than not playing a game anymore,or staring at the last graphics frame shown with a hard reset in your future.

VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE is what one error calls itself and fixed by disabling the "Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR)."Key added here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers then disabled.

I don't feel it's as big an issue as you paint it as. I play games on a daily basis under Windows 7, generally of the highly--graphically-taxing kinds of games, and I have yet to have issues with TDR -- no hard lock-ups, not thrown to the desktop suddenly with the game-client forced to quit, no nothing.

You need to stop blaming Windows and/or the GPU vendor and troubleshoot your system. My GPU has reset precisely zero times when playing BF3, over a total of about 107 hours. I have seen GPU resets on my system on rare occasion, generally with broken software, but never in BF3 and I have more than a bit of testing with it.

You need to stop blaming Windows and/or the GPU vendor and troubleshoot your system. My GPU has reset precisely zero times when playing BF3, over a total of about 107 hours. I have seen GPU resets on my system on rare occasion, generally with broken software, but never in BF3 and I have more than a bit of testing with it.

You have something wrong on your system, you should figure out what.

I'm not saying there's nothing is wrong with my system. I can say we havedifferent systems I built mine not sure yours, but they are different.

But, there IS something wrong with your system. You got a shit video card. Happened to me here in China. Can't recall the exact Nvidia model, but the card frequently reset playing Team Fortress 2. I found under clocking the GPU by 50 Mhz increased the stability, but it wasn't till I bought a Nvidia GT440 for 300 yuan that the problem went away completely. Now, TF2 and a host of other games like Batman: Arkham City, GTA IV, Dead Space 2, Bioshock 2, and Bionic Commando play perfectly. I haven't had a s

But, there IS something wrong with your system. You got a shit video card. Happened to me here in China. Can't recall the exact Nvidia model,

EVGA GTX-570, can't believe nobody has had this happen or heard of it, and yes something could very well be wrong with my system (OS).The hardware itself is top notch.

Between that registry entry and reinstalling the sound drivers once in a while I don't have problems any more.Can't have as much BF3 play time as I do and problems. not going to post the time played as it's excessive.

Try running some benchmark/testing software on your RAM. It sounds like you've some bad memory cells. And please be clipped to the case with an ESD wrist strap if/when you go poking around inside your case. I had a clients machine that would crash instantly if you waved your hand over the memory chips (dinosaur days). The ESD damage just accumulated enough that the system became flaky. I replaced the chips and the problem went away.

Wasn't it that the OS will reset the graphics driver, not the program?

Lots of dissent on my post some people have problems some don't.

I fixed the problem I was having by myself and google, the graphics driverwas never reported as a problem, just an entry in the EventViewer that BF3.exe had stopped workingI'd never of known why this specific error occurred if I hadn't of had that one.DMP file to debugged.

A copy and paste of a portion of the debug output is how I found the site I referenced as that'sexactly how my debug output read.

"I wouldn't pin this problem on Microsoft. Ultimately, this crash is due to game/software developersand graphics card manufacturers (such as ATI/AMD and NVidia) developing buggy devices and softwareand not playing by the rules and standards dictated for a specific platform like Windows. There aremany cases of similar events happening on UNIX/Linux systems, so this problem is not specifically isolated to Windows."

Presumably the article refers to
Direct Rendering Management [wikipedia.org] and not Digital Rights Management. Any clue what GEM they are talking about? Unless it's a revival of Digital Research's GEM [wikipedia.org] -- the alternate windowing platform that Ventura Publisher used to use. Article authors: Please expand acronyms with the first usage.

I had the exact same association with GEM, but the link you provided really made me relive moments from over 25 odd years ago in college where I first saw that beast called GEM. Seeing your #id, I guess our lawns are in the same street.